The Right Medicine

Once again the propaganda barrage against the American health-care system is in full cry. The Washington Post headlines the “disgrace” of American health care. Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, gets public attention with the farcical claim that pretty soon health costs will be so high that only Donald Trump will be able to afford medical care. The Los Angeles Times pontificates: “Despite its glaring failures, the American health-care system is the most expensive in the world. The United States is the only industrialized democracy without universal health insurance.” And as usual there is no shortage of nostrum peddlers offering recipes for “universal health insurance.”

If the proverbial visitor from Mars were to arrive and survey this cacophony, he would, as an unbiased observer, notice at least three different things that normally go unremarked in the invective of the health-care debate.

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Harry Schwartz

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Once again the propaganda barrage against the American health-care system is in full cry. The Washington Post headlines the “disgrace” of American health care. Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, gets public attention with the farcical claim that pretty soon health costs will be so high that only Donald Trump will be able to afford medical care. The Los Angeles Times pontificates: “Despite its glaring failures, the American health-care system is the most expensive in the world. The United States is the only industrialized democracy without universal health insurance.” And as usual there is no shortage of nostrum peddlers offering recipes for “universal health insurance.”

If the proverbial visitor from Mars were to arrive and survey this cacophony, he would, as an unbiased observer, notice at least three different things that normally go unremarked in the invective of the health-care debate.